There have always been and will increasingly be terminology confusion in the online marketing field.  Everyday there are new ideas, innovation concepts and cutting-edge technologies on the horizon, and search and social marketers are in a constant uphill run to absorb the latest trends and lingo.

Add all of that with the need to explain what we do to people outside of the industry, and it becomes very important for us to attempt to keep it simple.  Some of my favorite misconceptions are:

• online marketing is easy and anyone can do it
• your website is all you need
• online marketing is a scam

Blame the companies that tell you they can get you x number of links in x amount of time for x amount of money.  These are the broad misconceptions, then there are the specific ones, like video search engine optimization.

Video Marketing & Search Engines

There are many marketers out there calling video optimization, video SEO or video search engine optimization.  This is a big no no.  Search Engine Optimization is the process of selecting targeted and relevant keywords and key phrases related to a websites products or industry to help ensure that the site ranks when those keywords or key phrases are searched for.  Indeed, this is a very broad and basic definition and SEO covers so many other things, but you get the gist.  So if you apply that to video, calling it video search engine optimization, you are essentially saying that you are selecting targeted and relevant keywords for the video so it shows up in search.

Videos cannot be crawled by search engine spiders.  Spiders do not have the ability to go inside a video and index the content of that video (considering the fact that they currently can distinguish a very simply image, perhaps someday that capability will exist).  Therefore, it is not the video that is being optimized, but the content surrounding the video, i.e. the title, the description, the tags, etc.  That means we are doing video optimization or optimizing video for the web.

To clarify (or confuse) even further, when you search in Google for a keyword, a video can come up based on its content.  So how is that not video search engine optimization at work?  Google is ranking that video based on the content that surrounds the video, not on the content of the video itself.  With search sharing sites (not a search engine) like YouTube, the algorithms in these sites is also based on the content that surrounds the video.  This is why a YouTube video will rank in Google.

Optimizing Video for the Web

When marketers use terms like video search engine optimization, they are essentially telling someone that you can put a video up on your site and voila, the search engine spiders will crawl it, index it and know what the heck it is about.  Do not make that mistake.  Make sure you optimize your video for the web by creating targeted, keyword rich, high-quality content on the page where your video lives.  Video is a huge component to the online marketing world, a format that can draw a large number of visitors to your site, so it is critical that it be used to the best of its ability.  And please stop saying video search engine optimization.

As of today, I’m the owner of not one, but three drum sets.  While I did my share of ‘mama-daddies’ and ‘paradiddles’, I’m only an amateur drummer at best, and the drums the legacy of my father, who had been a really great drummer.  As a child, he was selected to perform on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour.  Prior to one show, Ted Mack took a group of the talents to meet his predesessor Major Bowes at the latter’s estate.  Evidently,  Bowes had an oversized model railroad, and that was the one detail that stuck with Dad.

A small detail of history…

One of the great things about the technnology changes we have witnessed in our lives is the change in access to media.  In older times, if you were a talent, you’d need to somehow get noticed on the Major Bowes or Ted Mack Amateur Hour programs, and later, Ed Sullivan.  Today, you can post to YouTube.

One of my favorites is a musician on YouTube who goes by the moniker of “MysteryGuitarMan”.  Many of his video shorts had to have required dozens of hours in the making, and in the case of a few, the help of friends.  But the bottom line is these are works of a talented individual.

I asked a thirteen-yearl old if he had seen Mystery Guitar Man, and he replied, “of course, everyone has”. Have you?  If you have seen a particular YouTube that you think we MUST all know about, please include it here.

Link Building Secrets: The Intangible Element

Here’s what you probably already know about the link building process…

We set forth creating unique valuable content on a site and start building relevant links to promote this content in order to bring more traffic to your site.  Throughout the link building process, we incorporate elements of SEO in order to make it easier for visitors and search engines to find you.

Here’s what you may not know about the link building process:

Oftentimes we forget that there is an intangible aspect to the link building process.  It is this incorporeal element that can be considered the secret to link building…

Concepts from The Secret To Better Understand Link Building

Using ideas from the best-selling book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, here are some link building secrets that you may not have been aware of…before now.

“We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.”

Seek out communities that share the same passion as you do when link building.  Upon entering these communities, your thoughts should be to get to know the community members and share your enthusiasm for what you do.  By doing this, you will be adding value to the community and you’ll be attracting people to you and your site.

“People think about what they don’t want and attract more of the same.”

There was a story in the book Groundswell about a blog post that revealed the HD-DVD processing key, which made it possible to watch HD-DVD movies in Linux.  This post eventually became so popular that it made its way to the top of Digg who was then forced to take it down by the owners of this intellectual property who didn’t want this code to be made public for obvious reasons.  But instead, it backfired.  The result was that people found out about this story and the code became even more popular.  So the moral of the story is, think and act affirmatively not covertly.

“It’s OK that thoughts don’t manifest into reality immediately (if we saw a picture of an elephant and it instantly appeared, that would be too soon).”

The image used in The Secret is of a flower that is just below the surface.  We’ve been watering it and taking good care of it, but sometimes just before it is about to bloom, we get discouraged and so we stop.  The link building process is similar to this in that results usually occur after some time.  However, there are ways to speed up the process…

“You might get an inspired thought or idea to help you move towards what you want faster.”

One of the most effective link building tactics hands-down is to create a viral campaign for your site.  This means having the inspiration or the idea to develop some type of viral content to promote that will eventually gather its own momentum.  Making this part of the link building process is one way to move towards your goal faster.

“Shift your awareness.”

Do you see the glass as half empty of half full?  Knowing what you know now about the secrets of link building, I hope you’d see the glass as half full.  By shifting your awareness in this way, you’ll be constantly nourishing your link building garden with new quality link building ideas.  And eventually, you’ll notice the first signs of life and then you’ll know that you’ve experienced first-hand The Link Building Secret!

Changes In SEO For Video and Explosive Online Video Trends

It’s pretty safe to say that the future of Internet video marketing is bright. Some (*cough*BruceClay*cough) even suggest that if you don’t have video on your website, you’ll have a tough time getting the attention of search engines. In other words, online video and video search engine optimization are becoming the norm, it seems. Just how effectively you can implement SEO for video remains to be seen, but the groundwork is has certainly been laid.

So here’s a list of some of the top news and developments in the video SEO world. Most of this information is gleaned from ReelSEO.com, a great site for information on all things related to Internet video – everything from algorithmic shifts to consumer trends.

Top Technical Developments In Online Video Marketing

YouTube Gives Users New Analytics Features

YouTube Insight got a boost and that means more useful information for us to pore over. We’ve got new access to stats on mobile users, subscribers and discovery over time. Discovery over time is sweet because it mashes together two existing stats (popularity and how viewers found your video) and creates a data set showing how people discovered your video over time. That makes figuring out how traffic is being driven to your video a heck of a lot easier.

Deep Linking To Specific Points Within A Video

TechCrunch told us in 2009 that YouTube is now allowing links directly to a given point in time within an online video. While it’s not really a huge change to your average user, the ability to send traffic to specific points in a video could have significant advantages. First – how it works. To “deep link” to a YouTube video, you append a tag to the end of the video URL to indicate at what minute and second mark the link should find. So, take any Youtube video URL and tack on a “t=1m33s” if you want the user to find themselves 1 minute and 33 seconds into the video. What are the benefits? Well, one example might be for businesses that offer a variety of services featured in an Internet video. Instead of sending prospective or existing clients to the whole video (which they might not be interested in), you direct them to the exact portion of content that applies to them. Imagine that video as a website. In internet marketing terms and in practicing search engine optimization, you want people to find the pages on your site that are helpful to them. A video should be treated no different – a way to direct users to the source.

YouTube adds real-time comment search functionality

ReadWriteWeb told us in October 2009 that YouTube quietly rolled out the ability to search video comments as they happen. It feels a little like Twitter or Facebook in that new comments roll in as you search. The primary advantage is that you can track your brand and find out what is being said as its

Word is this function is not fully launched, so it’s unclear whether it will undergo any change (or disappear all together). It is out there, though. So try it out if you’re tracking a brand.

Google Maps Throws On A New Layer – Video

In December, ReelSEO told us that Google launched a new video layer within Google Maps – placing local video one step closer to becoming a more prominent feature in search. To get to the new layer, you click the “more” button in the upper right corner of the map and check off “videos.”

Available internet videos (pretty much only YouTube offerings) show up as thumbnails and, depending on how far you zoom out, some video thumbnails are larger on the map. The videos play within the window that pops up. One fun thing to try here – zoom out pretty far and check out how many videos there actually are on this map. How does this help SEO for video?

It’s another place for people to see your video and it’s incredibly geo-specific – meaning that your site’s connection with that video will throw juice your way (theoretically).

A look at Google Maps' video layer

Non-Profits Get New Privileges on YouTube

YouTube announced that non profits can take advantage of a pair of new features inaccessible to other account holders. Non profits can now place external links to their own site and they can choose custom thumbnails for their videos. To qualify, you must be a recognized non profit (with 501(c)(3) tax status); can’t be religious or political in nature; must not focus mainly on political lobbying; and commercial organizations, credit-counseling services; donation middle man services, fee-based organizations, universities, and some others are not eligible.

What does this mean for you? Nothing, if you aren’t a nonprofit. Most of the value to this announcement is the normal nonprofit favoring that exists in normal SEO is now seeping into the land of internet video marketing.

THE HOLY GRAIL OF ONLINE VIDEO ROI…maybe not, but it’s still cool

Bottom line: YouTube’s new call-to-action overlay is designed to help track how many of your viewers take action (buy something, fill out a contact form…basically any action you want users to take).

We got the details from ReelSEO.com:

“So how exactly do you track all of that via YouTube? Well, with their new Call-to-action overlay will help drive users from Promoted Videos, and you can track the clicks within Youtube insight. This has been in testing for some time they tell us and there was a lot of dialog with search marketers on how they wanted it to work. Now, anyone who runs a campaign on YouTube with Promoted Videos can take advantage of the new ability to drive users away from YouTube as desired.

All you need to do in order to take advantage of the new overlay is begin a campaign to promote your video on YouTube. Go into the video details page for that specific video and fill out the ‘call-to-action overlay’ fields there. These fields include a headline, ad text, destination URL and an image if you wish. When the video is played the overlay will show up and the interactions will be tracked on your YouTube Insight.”

List of Video Search Engines & Video Search Web Sites

Hey, why not throw a honkin’ list of video search engines and sites right in the middle of this blog? It’s a pretty cool list, after all. Composed by Mark Robertsom at ReelSEO.com, this is basically the best list I’ve ever seen…ever. Take a deep breath…and check it out:

Yahoo Video – http://video.yahoo.com; Google Video – http://video.google.com; Windows Live Video – http://search.live.com/video; MSN Video – http://video.msn.com; AOL Video – http://video.aol.com; Mega Video – http://www.megavideo.com; Veoh – http://www.veoh.com; OVGuide – http://ovguide.com; AltaVista Video – http://www.altavista.com/video; Blinkx – http://www.blinkx.com; MeFeedia – http://www.mefeedia.com; Stickam – http://www.stickam.com; Expert Village – http://www.expertvillage.com; Guba – http://www.guba.com; Flixya – http://www.flixya.com; Search for Video – http://www.searchforvideo.com; uVouch – http://www.uvouch.com; Clipta – http://www.clipta.com; Video Surf – http://www.videosurf.com; SuTree – http://www.sutree.com; Clip Shack – http://www.clipshack.com; Sproose – http://sproose.com; FFWD – http://www.ffwd.com; Video Crawler – http://www.videocrawler.com; Clip Blast – http://www.clipblast.com; Juicecaster.com – http://www.juicecaster.com; Dabble – http://www.dabble.com; Trooker – http://www.trooker.com; Panjea – http://www.panjea.com

Online Video Marketing Boosts Perceived Home Values

Anywhere you look, you can see evidence that Internet video can have a significant impact on real estate industries. Several sources show that online video and high-quality photography have a real effect perceived real estate property values.  Survey results show that the presence of an online video tour in marketing real estate increased the perceived value of a home by 6%. On a $200,000 piece of real estate, that could be an extra $12,000 in your pocket.

Online Video Marketing Continues Ridiculous Trajectory

Here’s some hard data for you on Internet video that is a little mind-boggling. ComScore released their online video numbers for September 2009, and a trend that has been building for months continues to grow – online video views at an all time high.

From ReelSEO.com – more than 168 Million U.S. viewers watched online video during that month, accumulating nearly 26 Billion total views. Google still has a stranglehold on the competition with a 40.2% market share.  Hulu, though, is a just 2.2%.

Either way, those numbers are huge. Too many people are watching video on the Internet for you to ignore it any longer.

October 2009 was a big month for Video SEO numbers, too

According to ReelSEO, in November of 2008, YouTube became the 2nd largest search engine in the U.S. when it bypassed Yahoo and took second chair to its owner, Google. YouTube hasn’t slowed much ever since.

From ReelSEO.com:

“This past month, October, 2009, there were a total of more than 3.7 Billion search queries on YouTube as measured by comScore.  This represents and increase of more than 31 percent year over year (vs 2,580,000.000 queries in Oct. 2008) and an increase of 7% over just last month.  Yahoo, although still the 3rd largest search engine, has now fallen more than 1 billion queries/mo behind YouTube.”

http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-search-engine-domination/

OHMYGOD BRUCE CLAY HAS SPOKEN: Your Site Will Tank Without Video

Reel SEO interviewed SEO grandfather-guru Bruce Clay in 2009 and asked Bruce about the importance of online video when it comes to search ranking algorithms in Google. He said “engagement objects” (like video) on a site will attract the search engines and their algorithms will treat you a little nicer than those sites without video (or some type of object through which visitors interact with your site). Just watch the video at the link above.

A Quarter of Small Businesses Aim to Spend More on Internet Video in 2010

Ad-ology Research told us this year that more than 25% of small businesses are planning on some degree of Internet video spending for 2010 – some 75% more than 2009. Ad-ology reported that The 28% are planning to spend more for online video, 25% on social networking and 21% on mobile ads.

Streaming Media Market to Grow 135% Over 5 Years

From ReelSEO.com, more good news about the explosive growth of online video:

“It is estimated that the streaming media business segment will generate more than $78 billion in revenue in the United States over the next six years. The Insight Research Corp. recently released the results of an industry study which states that streaming media will be a major source of revenue through 2014. For the next 5 years they predict that revenue from streaming media will grow at a rate of 27 percent per year thanks to more and more people turning to online audio and video. That means over 135% growth through 2014.”

Internet Video Marketing Had A Great 2009…and SEO for Video looks Great in 2010

All the signs are there – high growth rates; steady technological advances; a search industry that is slowly making room for video. What that all adds up to is online video marketing becoming the norm, rather than the exception. SEO for video is young, but video search engine optimization shows a lot of room for growth and continuing promise. For some tips on video SEO, check out this recent post on Internet Video marketing.

Viral Marketing Gone Wrong, or Horribly Right?

Like all too many people, the afternoon and early evening hours of October 15^th, I was rather worried and obsessed about the status of the Balloon Boy situation.

“Hey, there is a 6 year old kid floating in a homemade balloon over Colorado!”

The earliest utterances of a co-worker in the office (who picked it up on Facebook from a friend posting it) became an afternoon of fitting in work between refreshing my Twitter search feed and resulted in channel hopping when I was home and close to the news channels.

As a mother of two troublesome children only slightly older than Balloon Boy, I could relate all too well to the panic and worry that this own parents could have (would have / should have) been experiencing. I bristled when people criticized their parenting on Twitter because really; the two kids were only playing in their own yard and that the yard had a filled homemade space balloon was only slightly odd. I tried to ignore the calls of a publicity stunt for either Disneys “Up” Movie or the Wife Swap show; after all, if real, then the child could have really been in harm’s way and this story could have had a fatal and tragic ending.

And while the Michael Jackson Joke was funny, I would NOT laugh until I knew Balloon Boy wasn’t dead after falling out of the balloon. I was genuinely happy that he was only asleep in a box in his attic and, like many, assumed that the poor kid knew he was in trouble for letting Daddy’s weird balloon go and was afraid of the mess he produced.

Looking like the Great Balloon Boy Hoax of 2009

And now, like so many again; I am feeling angry and resentful over the true emotional concern I felt for that little 6 year old boy. I can say that I sure don’t blame Balloon Boy himself even if it IS a hoax as. In fact, I would not have blamed him if it all was true and he was in the space balloon floating over Colorado. Again, I wouldn’t have even blamed the parents if it was true and it ended badly. I’m not pleased that it IS looking like a hoax after Falcon admitted on a CNN interview that “it was for a show”

Why? Who thought it was a good idea to pretend that the child was lost in a balloon over Colorado? For what ultimate viral gain was this story produced? Wife Swap Views? Personal notoriety? Space Balloon Orders? Alien Attention?

If it was a viral hoax then what was the intended goal?

The Backlash of Being Virally Duped Might Get Ugly Indeed

The Balloon Boy Hoax, still, essentially worked more than perfectly in a natural viral capacity:

• Denver’s 9News Web site increased from an average one million per day to 4.6 million.
• Twitter became Balloon Boy Central with lots of prayers and wished, plus the tasteless jokes and true hoax speculations and many folks say “WTF is #balloonboy”
• Responsible for hundreds of thousand of YouTube views and more are still coming!
• There are, of course, Balloon Boy T-shirts.
• We all know about the original Wife Swap episode and the 100^th episode revisit and I would bet that they will re-run it very soon and the overall views will be much higher than normal even if people only watch to hate on them. I do wish I had looked at the Wife Swap site yesterday morning before it all started to see if the Henne Family was positioned front and center as they are now. Maybe they were because they were deemed “as one of America’s four favorite families”. Now, alas, I think they might be among the most mocked and scorned.
• The various news channels did follow our obsessive lead and give us non-stop news and conjectures about the Balloon boy whereabouts.
• My guess is that BalloonBoy.com , a true balloon company in Belgium, is really quite happy too. Surprisingly enough, quite a few “BalloonBoy” domain names are still open and can be bought. I guess after this Hoax thing, the demand is less today than yesterday.

All over the world, the story spread and whether people either cared, mocked, prayed or laughed; we made it clear that Balloon Boy was important to us on a Thursday afternoon.

Why Did We All Care About Balloon Boy and Make it Go Viral?

Over at the SMX East Conference last week in NYC, we discussed viral marketing and the one thing that all the experts agreed on is that you can’t “make” something go viral. It’s like a natural phenomenon. You can plan a campaign, you can see the target markets, but after that; it’s up to the content and the fickled amusement of the internet world. In fact, one of the many pages of notes that I have from the conference is a list of what appeals to the YouTube markets and what kinds of video garner the millions of views. According to industry experts and probably easily agreed to by anyone who bothers watching enough You Tube, to get the massive hits a video should have:

• Amazing and unbelievable stunts
• People getting big injuries
• Really creepy cats
• Someone kicking or hurling a baby
• A freak accident
• An explosion
• Kids behaving badly, usually under the influence of Drugs or alcohol
• Dancing: either really badly or amazingly well

Following that criteria, the Balloon Boy story has met enough true viral criteria; amazing stunt, freak accident, and kids behaving badly and strongly hinted at the possibility of other viral attractions; big injuries and maybe an explosion? We were all hooked. We cared about Falcon Henne. That’s a good thing. If it was truly what it seemed to be and that little boy was trapped in a balloon, then all the well wishes and prayers for his well being would have been good.

It just doesn’t make sense that an impossibly planned and horribly tasteless hoax such as Balloon Boy with no obvious intended goal really happened the way it seemed too. I’m still not sure. I wasn’t sure yesterday and I am still not sure now.

I do think that anyway the story pans out, the Henne Family will be judged, mocked, criticized and affected for quite some time..whether they deserve it or not.

Video search engine optimization is like a kid going through puberty – weirdly awkward, unsure and growing like hell

 The first song MTV ever played was “Video killed the radio star.” Well, depending on who you talk to, video might just be ready to kill again.

Internet, online, or web video marketing…whatever you want to call it, it’s banging on the door. The thing is, it seems like no has figured out which key opens that door.

When it comes to viral online video marketing, YouTube is a radical game changer, but can it survive with what amounts to a choose-your-own-adventure business plan? Quality video cameras are so cheap to make now, even your crappiest of crappy cell phones shoot decent footage. But do people respond to more polished, produced video or lower-quality, grittier footage? Traditional organic SEO techniques prove quite effective when it comes to optimizing web pages through text-based meta-data and page content, but will search engine optimization for video actually work?

Despite what some modern-day, techno-hucksters might have you believe, we don’t really know those answers to most video SEO questions…yet.

What we do know is that tons of people watch Internet video. And we kinda know how to implement video search engine optimization. Add some creativity and quality content and we have a fledgling industry here.

The thing is, how are Google and any other search engines going to treat video as we head towards a fully developed online video marketing industry powered by video SEO? One shift in treatment by Google of how they return video results, and this young trade could be turned on its ear.

The point is, there are a lot of variables at play that will determine how the relationship between web video and SEO turns out.

In the meantime, here are a few thoughts on why video is awesome and what we know so far on souping up web video marketing…SEO-style.* 

Why Internet Video Is Awesome

• Google’s “Universal Search” was introduced in May 2007, but already one-fourth of U.S. Google searches (and more in other parts of the world) return videos in the results. (htt2) According to market trends expert Brian Haven, over fifty percent of Internet users are viewing at least one web video per month. (htt3) 
• Internet videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages

“On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results-giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results-giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results.”      

                                   ~ study by Nate Elliott, now with Forrester Research (FORR). (htt2) 

• U.S. video views have (as expected) surpassed searches-there were 12.7 billion video views in November 2008 and 12.3 billion searches. (htt2) Internet video marketing is predicted to be a $3 billion dollar business by 2010 (source: eMarketer), the use of video for search marketing, while still in its infancy, is growing at a tremendous rate. (htt3) 
• In a PermissionTV survey of more than 400 executives, 67% said online video would be a primary focus of their 2009 online marketing, with 52% expecting to start or extend web video marketing projects in the second quarter of this year, up from 32% at the time of the study in December. (htt2) 
• Video isn’t king, just yet – video production is expensive and intensive, and watching a video takes time, which may cut down on conversion, it’s most appropriate for visual industries and branding efforts, not direct response. (htt2) 
• Market Experiments Journal produced several amateur style videos for posting on the web that would serve as experimental viral online video marketing. These 28 videos pulled over 80,000 views in one month, and by sixty days they had received over 300,000 views with no additional work or investment. (htt3) 
• There are already some search engines like Blinkx that use speech recognition and visual analysis instead of just metadata in order to determine the nature of specific video content. Capabilities like these and further advances will continue to change the way video can be used to create online exposure, but the value of video SEO for the future is clear. (htt3) 
• Video allows the video creator to communicate a message on multiple levels – visual imagery, spoken word, music and text. This is the way people learn, and the way legendary brands are created. When was the last time that a paid search listing or banner ad raised your blood pressure or induced you to forward something to a friend? (htt5) 
• The ROI of online video marketing can be astounding. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau; more than 50% of the US population will watch video online next year. That’s 155.2 million people, just in the US! According to comScore, Americans watched 9 billion online videos just in the month of July. (htt5) 
• Online video is a powerful medium for marketing because of its engagement potential, SEO value, and measurement opportunities. (htt5) 

Video SEO: How to optimize video (or, more accurately, how to optimize for video):

 
TEXT: Surround your videos with on page copy that can be indexed by the search engines.

More and more people suggest including transcripts with the on-site hosted video. This transcript will not only provide valuable text threading, but it can also include anchor text links specific to key phrases. (htt3) Regardless, the text should be keyword rich and relevant, including links to other relevant content on your site. (htt4)  For on-site videos, it’s advisable to have just one video per page with a simple text title and description place near the video itself. (htt5)

URLS:  Put site URL into video description and into video itself. URLs should be optimized for keywords

METADATA and TITLE:  For video pages the focus should be on the video content. (htt4) For offsite, conflicting views on how dense KW usage should be. Some say cram it all in for maximum impact. Others say that method red-flags your content as spam. Maybe going with SEO best practices for video search engine optimization would be better until it’s clearer. Some also suggest including information like title, length, keywords, and authorship associated with a particular video clip. (htt3)

SITEMAP and PLAYLIST: When it comes to a video sitemap and Video SEO there are no doubts how important they are. Why? Google does not accept mRSS feeds, however they do accept Video Sitemaps through their webmaster interface.  Put all your video in one directory. When it comes to videos, utilizing a simple playlist can accomplish spiderability and useability. You want them to be crawlable and relevant to the content on the page. A video page is also a great place to bring in all related content, including: articles, photos and audio. (htt4)

SHARE and LINKAGE: allow comments and ratings. (htt7) Share everywhere you can, dammit. The most important component of a Social Media Strategy as it relates to Video SEO, are blogs. (htt4)

• Inbound Links: Allow visitors to embed your videos into their websites, blogs, profiles and social networks. Provide an HTML wrapper which enables you to utilize SEO optimized anchor text that links back to your website. You should contact websites and blogs that are relevant to your topic and work on developing a linking partnership. (htt4)
• Internal Links: Spiderable links like video play lists, related links and breadcrumbs not only help search engines build a good picture of your websites infrastructure but can aid your visitors with content discovery. (htt4)

 FEEDS: RSS and mRSS

• RSS feeds do not directly impact video SEO/search engines but should be used as part of an overall traffic building strategy. (htt4)
• mRSS feeds directly impact video search engines by allowing a website to submit their video content directly to video search engines. MRSS feed components contain standard RSS elements like meta data, URL to content and thumbnails, but the key differences are the important additional elements that can impact rankings. These elements, which include video ratings, play count and tags, should be included whenever possible. Each of the video search engines that accept mRSS feeds have different requirements when it comes to building a mRSS feed but the best example and standard comes from Yahoo: Yahoo mRSS specifications. (htt4)

VIDEO FILE NAME:  Whenever possible you should name your video file in a keyword descriptive manner. (htt4)

THUMBNAILS: If your thumbnail is bad it often doesn’t matter if you got all of the other components of the formula right. Typically thumbnails that are relevant and match the video title, description and tags are all you need.  Beyond this, try to select the image that best captures the essence of your video. The thumbnail that you choose for your video is one of the most important factors in terms of the number of people that choose to view your video. (htt5)

KEYWORDS:  Do key word research as usual. Don’t forget to encode the keywords you are targeting into your video. Try to use the word “video” as much as possible, make sure the word “video” is used in your title, description, meta data etc. (htt7) For off-site placement, after you’ve uploaded your videos add the related keywords (tags) you discovered in your research. Don’t overuse them; if there are too many, the search engines see them as spam. Use them naturally in descriptions, and use the URL to your website in the first sentence of your video’s description. (htt6)

And, as always, NO FLASH PLAYERS!!!!! Google still hates flash.

It’s pretty clear that video SEO has come quite a ways and that video search engine optimization still has a long way to go.

 Like I said before, internet video marketing is still flailing around, trying to find its bearings. New techniques and changes in practice are happening almost daily. Stay tuned to the DragonSearch Marketing blog for more on the present and future of video SEO.

*This is an aggregate of the best information available on the Internet from experts in the field. This document is designed to be updated and modified as needed to respond to the changes in the industry.

 Works Cited

• (htt2). http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090212_136831.htm – article
• (htt3). http://www.arteworks.biz/2008/01/video-seo-101.html
• (htt4). http://webtribution.com/2008/08/11/video-seo-guide-and-best-practices/
• (htt5). http://www.tubemogul.com/research/video_marketing_101.php
• (htt6). http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/searchoptimization/searchengineoptimizationcolumnistjonrognerud/article201052.html
• (htt7). http://www.gatorwademarketing.com/1446/10-video-seo-tips-marketing-your-videos-to-the-search-engines/